Cowardice

A response to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

You’re investigating a murder; a man walking home from work was shot down in the night by a thief after the money in his pocket. You find that the killer had left behind the murder weapon while leaving the scene; a gun, owned by the manager of a nearby store. The gun’s recent history, coupled with a witness claim, leads the police to arresting the store owner, sending him to jail. Only after the alleged murderer had been sentenced do you realize that the ‘witness’ had been the real killer, fleeing from the country, framing the innocent and letting them suffer the punishment he was to cowardly to take; a perfect description of Injun Joe in Mark twains book, Tom Sawyer. Injun Joe might have been able to lie to the entire town while keeping a straight face, but Joe was the definition of coward as he persecuted the innocent Muff Potter to keep himself from harm. Cowardice is not how often a person runs away, it’s why they run away from events and obstacles people face.
When people run away, others call it cowardly, telling them running away makes a person chicken-hearted, but those are biased statements; running away doesn’t make a person cowardly, it’s the reasons for running away that make the difference. When a person picks a fight with a force greater than they are, they put themselves in a position where running away would be cowardly, as the person went out of their way to start something they turned out to be too craven to finish. If it’s the other way around, however, the greater force would become the coward, their decisions leading to the conclusion that they face only those smaller than themselves, being too scared to face forces that would actually have a chance against them; this would be a time when a person could run away honorably. Injun Joe displayed cowardice when he persecuted Muff Potter; Joe was the greater power, when he tricked Muff Potter into think he himself had been the killer, then again when he broke his promise to Potter and told the entire town his lie, being the only known person fully conscious at the time of the murder. Later, Injun Joe became the coward once more, as the man against the greater power, the town, when he used the window in the courtroom to escape the conflict he’d started by murdering Doctor Robinson.
Running away isn't always cowardly, but to eliminate an opponent's chance to walk away is always chicken-hearted as well as unfair. Beginning an encounter by sneaking up on a person and aggressing from behind is unfair and implies the person is afraid to let their adversary identify them. The person being ambushed doesn't know what's going on or that an encounter has even been started, making the confrontation unfair in favor of the aggressor, and abolishing chances for the person to walk away. When Injun Joe and his accomplice tried to assassinate the Widow Douglas, it was just like that; Joe’s plan was to sneak into the house in the middle of the night when Widow Douglas was asleep then attack her without warning, bringing as much torture to the widow as possible. Widow Douglas wouldn’t have a chance to run away or get help in an unfair fight against two grown men with intentions to kill, thus no one would know that Injun Joe had not yet fled the country, giving him an easy escape from the base act.
When cowardly decisions are made, such as running from the results of poor judgment, people can make up for them, but not get rid of them. Burglary is a terrible and cowardly act; people break into a house in the middle of the night, when the owners of the house are asleep or gone away, so that no one can see them steal another person’s property then run away and hide. If, however, by some miracle, a burglar would return stolen items, face to face with the one they stole from, the cowardice of the act would have been made up for, but the act itself would still be over the burglar’s head; they would still be eligible for a jail sentence. Muff Potter ran away like a coward, the reality of the act he’d fictitiously committed too much to bear, let alone the consequences for it, but with his return to the scene of the crime, the cowardice of Potter’s running away was forgiven, but neither of the acts themselves. However much it took Injun Joe to keep a straight face while he wove his lies, he remained a coward, having lied rather than given the truth, on top of his previous acts.
Cowardice isn't how much a person runs away, it's the decisions a person makes in life how they respond to the results. To be cowardly is to lack the heart to finish what is started, hiding from consequences of past decisions, cheating and lying a way to desires. People that oppress those smaller or feebler, using underhanded and sneaky tactics to persecute all others are cowardly as well. People should be fair and honest, seeing decisions through to the end, facing up to whatever happens along the way; with out these things, we’d live in a world where all people are cowardly, backhanded killers like Injun Joe, or worse.